Vatican Calls For Conversion Of Muslims And Other Non-Christians But Not Jews

A Vatican official has issued a call for Catholics to convert Muslims and other non-Christians, but not Jews.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the head of the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, made the statement during a recent interfaith meeting of Catholic and Jewish leaders at the Woolf Institute of Cambridge University.

“We have a mission to convert Muslims to Christianity,” the cardinal said, emphasizing that jihadists who persecute Christians in the Middle East — like the members of ISIS and al-Qaida — especially should be targeted for conversion.

“We have a mission to convert all non-Christian religions’ people except Judaism,” Koch said, adding that he exempted Jews because Christianity “was born from Judaism.”

Despite their religious differences, Christianity and Judaism share a special bond, the cardinal said, urging Christians to view Judaism as a “mother.”

“It is very clear that we can speak about three Abrahamic religions, but we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in Jewish and the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition is not the same. In this sense we have only with Jewish people this unique relationship that we do not have with Islam,” Koch told the attendants of the meeting.

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His comments were in line with the position of Pope Francis and a document released by the Vatican in December.

The document — published by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews — dealt with the church’s relationship with the Jews and Judaism and unequivocally stated that God never annulled his covenant with the Jewish people.

As a consequence, “the Church is obligated to view evangelization to Jews, who believe in one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views,” the document read.

Pope Francis reiterated this position in January during a visit to the synagogue of Rome.

[The Church] recognizes the irrevocability of the covenant [between God and the Jewish people] and God’s constant and faithful love for Israel. It is clear there is an inseparable bond between Christians and Jews.

Fifty years ago the Vatican released the Nostra Aetate, a famous declaration that condemned all forms of anti-Semitism and implied that Jew hatred was a sin against God. The Nostra Aetate also called for Jews and Christians to collaborate in biblical and theological enquiry and friendly discussions and expressed no desire for Jews to become Christians. The document aimed for “relegating the solution of Christian-Jewish disagreements about Christ until the eschatological dawning of God’s kingdom.”

“Together with the prophets and that same apostle, the church awaits the day, known to God alone, when all people call on God with one voice and serve Him shoulder to shoulder,” the Nostra Aetate stated, echoing in part the ancient Jewish Aleinu LeShabei’ach prayer that is recited at the end of each prayer service in the synagogue.

“From enemies and strangers, we have become friends and brothers the last half century. Mutual understanding, mutual trust, and friendship have grown and deepened,” the pope said during his visit to Rome’s synagogue.